UN Office of the Special Adviser on the Prevention of Genocide and the International Criminal Court Prosecutor: Investigate the Possibility that Israel is Committing the Crime of Genocide Against the Palestinian People

Below are presented details of this week’s 100th Anniversary of the WW1 Australian Beersheba Charge, the UK Balfour Declaration and the commencement of the Palestinian Genocide in 1917.

31 October 1917 Australian Beersheba Charge, British Empire conquest of Palestine and Palestinian Famine.

This week variously ignorant or mendacious Australian jingoists are celebrating the 100th anniversary of the famous charge of the Australian 4th Light Horse Brigade of the Anzac (Australian and New Zealand Army Corps) Mounted Division on 31 October 1917 that captured Beersheba and thus fatally compromised the Ottoman Turkish defensive line stretching from Beersheba to Gaza on the Mediterranean coast. Palestine and thence Syria rapidly fell to the British under General Allenby [32]. While this was a famous cavalry charge that is much celebrated in mindlessly racist and jingoist Australia, the immediate consequences for the Palestinians were devastating. War-imposed deprivation in Palestine under the genocidal British was associated with a Palestinian Famine in which 100,000 Palestinian died as estimated from a catastrophic 100,000 population deficit in WW1 Palestine [33-36].

Settler colonial societies are a distinct type of imperialist formation, which are premised on the racist elimination of the indigenous population through various means, including ethnic cleansing, genocide and/or assimilation.

Unlike other forms of colonialism that centre on the exploitation of resources, settler colonialism is primarily concerned with the control of territory and the elimination of the indigenous population in order to replace it with a settler population. As the late Australian academic and leading settler-colonial theorist, Patrick Wolfe, notes: “settler colonialism destroys to replace”.

Before, during and after Israel’s foundation, the Zionist movement sought to control as much of historic Palestine as possible, establishing a permanent settler population by eliminating and replacing the indigenous Palestinian Arab population.

The Israeli government and its allies refuse to accept the sincerity of this or any of the other changes to the charter, and continue to insist that Hamas is a terrorist organisation to be crushed without pity. What else could be expected from a racist state committed to the genocide of the Palestinian people?

About 2000 people rallied in Sydney on February 23 to protest the federal government hosting Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu and its support for Israel’s latest land grabs.

Uncle Ken Canning said: “The same murderous colonial mentality that is killing Palestinians landed here in 1788 and decimated us to 2.7% of the population. It is little wonder that [Prime Minister Malcolm] Turnbull welcomes Netanyahu, they are twin brothers in genocide.”

To jolt the politicians and their media acolytes, I’ll refer to genocide. Such a charge can be justified though it is usually regarded as a form of diplomatic blasphemy, too risky to make.

The 1948 UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, refers to any acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group.

Such acts would include killing members of a group; causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part.

Writing in December 2016, in Aljazeera English, the Jewish social analyst Stanley Cohen concluded that each of these genocidal type acts “has been perpetrated by Israel, seemingly with almost proud boast, and no accountability, for almost 70 unbroken years.

Israel is a prime target for ATT sanctions. The alarming Israeli documentary, The Lab by Yotam Feldman, reveals that Israel is a military economy that has locked 1.6 million Palestinians in its military laboratory cage where weaponry is battle-tested on Gaza. Billions of international dollars from western defense departments, including Australian, fuel the demand and validate Israeli atrocities;

“A key player in the military industries told me that the operational testing in Gaza of Elbit’s BMS (Battle Management System – a special internet-like system for ground forces), a huge project worth $1 billion, has allowed Elbit to raise its price in a deal signed a year later with Australia…A salesman for the IAI (Israel Aerospace Industries) told me that assassinations and operations in Gaza bring about an increase of tens of percentage points in company sales”. ~Yotam Feldman

To boost Israeli arms sales, Palestinian families have suffered three Israeli onslaughts of ‘systematic genocide’ wars in six years and are condemned to a life that is unnatural, stressful, traumatic, waiting for the next Israeli weapons testing that will again turn Gaza into ground zero.

The similarities between Australia and Israel should come as no surprise. Settler colonial societies are a distinct type of imperialist formation, which are premised on the racist elimination of the indigenous population through various means, including ethnic cleansing, genocide and/or assimilation.

“A Lover’s Country” is an important, well-written and eminently readable novel by academic and human rights activist Stuart Rees based on the real life event of the award of the prestigious Sydney Peace Prize in 2003 to Palestinian writer, scholar, legislator and activist Hanan Ashrawi that aroused the ire of the ferocious Australian Zionist Lobby and its Mainstream journalist, politician and academic supporters that dominate media and public life in Australia… Before reviewing “A Lover’s Country” [1] in detail, it is useful to sketch the major features of the ongoing Palestinian Genocide by US-, UK-, France-, Canada- and Australia-backed, nuclear terrorist, racist Zionist-run, democracy by genocide Apartheid Israel…”

The present-day haemorrhaging of international law, and with it, civilised values has its source in the Israel-US ( ISUS) interminable 68 year genocide of Palestine, cheered on and sanctioned by the faux-democracies of the West. I say ‘faux-democracies,’ as elections notwithstanding and no matter which political party wins, western nations have relinquished civilised principles, international law obligations and their sovereignty over foreign affairs, defense and trade to their ISUS masters. A case in point: the obligation of states to investigate and prosecute war crimes…

Samidoun Palestinian Prisoner Solidarity Network strongly condemns the detention of Hisham Ghalia and Mounis Hammouda in U.S. migrant detention and urges all to participate in the below action. Click here to take action.

Of course, the issue of migrant detention is not confined to the cases of Palestinian refugees; we join in the call for an immediate end to migrant detention – often indefinite – by U.S., Canada, Australia and other states. The detention of migrants and refugees is a violent act of criminalization that traumatizes traumatized people, tears apart families and subjects people to massive rights violations, in a context of racism and oppression. We also note the settler colonial nature of all of these states, built on the theft of Indigenous and Native land and genocide of Indigenous and Native people, while constructing detention centers to exclude migrants and refugees from this stolen land. We also note the racist migrant detention, attacks and criminalization by the Israeli state and institutions targeting African migrants and refugees, a vicious and anti-Black policy carried out by a settler colonial state based entirely on the dispossession of the Palestinian people, the theft of Palestinian land, and ongoing genocide.